Racehorses at 3 or 4 years old have reached their
competitive prime; afterwards they are no longer profitable.
Gambling increases the pressure to replace horses with younger,
faster stock. Even healthy young racehorses are killed because there
are not — and never can be — enough solutions for retirement. This
inherently cruel situation means that the "Sport of Kings" is simply
a bloodsport.

Racing in Macau — Israel's Future?

"They import hundreds of
horses every year. Where do you think all those horses end up?"
– Ian Paterson, Director of Racing, Macau Jockey Club

These photos are from an exposé
published in June, 2002 by the South China Morning Post, Hong
Kong. They show horses being shot in the head, one after another, on
the grounds of the Macau Jockey Club racetrack, then loaded onto a
truck and dumped at a landfill. This exposé demonstrated that even
healthy horses as young as four years old are killed continuously,
week after week, as more competitive replacements arrive.

A similar situation will almost
certainly exist in Israel if racing on a large scale is introduced.
As a horse gets older, he is less profitable, injured or not. The
Macau track has only about 1,000 horses, but even with only 1,000
horses, at least 300 are replaced each year. Most of those 300 are
killed. Therefore, it doesn't matter that Israel says it will import
"only" 2,000 horses. To have a viable racing industry, Israel will
have to continuously import more horses and kill the less useful
ones. This culling is unavoidable.

In larger
countries with many tracks, horses are often traded from one place
to another, and there are options such as retirement or
private ownership for sport riding. But even in large countries, these
options are not available for most of the horses. In tiny Israel, only
death, or a downward spiral of abuse and then death, will be the
fate of the vast majority.

"What matters is the fact that
no provision has been made by either the Macau Jockey Club or
the horses' owners to cater for horses that are healthy but
uneconomic."
— Editorial, South China Morning Post

Even within Macau's
successful racing industry, which brings in profits of 40 million dollars
a year, greed is the defining characteristic. To save a few dollars
each time, they shoot the horses when culling them instead of using
a euthanasia injection. At first the Jockey Club claimed they killed
the horses with a lethal injection. Only after the undercover
photographs exposed the shooting did they finally admit the truth.

All the vets on the
racetrack do
this killing on a rotating basis, so the vets have
all become complicit. At least some horses are killed every week —
each Thursday. The vets say they have no options because of the
difficulty of finding retirement places. Retiring the horses would
cost money. It isn't even the amount of money that's the issue,
but any cost at all. Horse owners prefer simply to condemn their
non-profitable horses to death.

The South China
Morning Post exposé also covered the racetrack in Hong Kong,
which is a much larger operation. Horses are killed there too, rather
than retired, but they do it away from the road, so the killing
cannot be witnessed and photographed.

Why can anyone
claim will it be
different in Israel, where there is certainly no support system for
horses, where the water situation is meager, and where there is
virtually no available grazing land?

Culling and killing are inevitable
in the horseracing industry.
This should not be part of Israel's future.